[bernf]

Not sure how I feel about this. I see a similar issue in what I consider mistreatment of delivery workers. There have been delivery services and transport services for disabled/elderly for a while now. People have been replacing them with gig workers and I'm not exactly sure who to blame or feel sorry for.

A post a while ago on reddit was someone who was complaining about a doordasher who didn't want to wait and bring like multiple bags of cat litter like up 3 flights of stairs. The amount of inconsiderate abuse people have towards them (making them wait, navigate buildings) is a poor allocation of resources.

[Karawebnetwork]

> A post a while ago on reddit was someone who was complaining about a doordasher who didn't want to wait and bring like multiple bags of cat litter like up 3 flights of stairs.

I would say that many of those who are unable to get to the store to buy cat litter are also unable to walk up three flights of stairs to pick it up.

Recently, I was recovering from surgery and was not allowed to get out of bed. The exception I made was to slowly crawl to the front door to pick up the food the dasher had left there. Often, even though the setting was set to "deliver to me", they would leave the food downstairs.

My only option then was to leave the food there to rot and hope someone steals it. This was particularly frustrating during the lockdown when restaurants would close early. By the time the bad delivery happened all restaurants in my area were closed.

Often, I was left without any options. I did cook food beforehand but sometimes even thawing food can be too much while you are recovering.

Getting the entire order reimbursed would mean that the delivery person won't get paid for the delivery at all. I did feel bad about it at first, but they could have kept their promise and brought it to me.

One option would be to allow Dashers to filter between "leave on front door" and "deliver to client". But no, I don't believe that I should feel bad for someone who lied about being able to fulfil the company's promise. Especially once it became a pattern.

I ended up ordering a lot of pizzas during that time, even if I don't particularly enjoy them. Old-school pizza delivery persons would not only deliver to my apartment's door but some would even offer to bring trash or recyclables downstairs for me.

[ev1]

Both PJ and Dominos now outsource deliveries to whitelabel "doordash enterprise" :(

I have not gotten a direct store driver in over 2 years.

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

Is this only in certain areas? I got a uniformed driver when I had some Dominos delivered to my hotel earlier this year.

[ev1]

Sorry, I meant pizza hut there. I think dominos is still mostly inhouse (though the $5-10 delivery fee sucks and "is not a tip")

[wongarsu]

> A post a while ago on reddit was someone who was complaining about a doordasher who didn't want to wait and bring like multiple bags of cat litter like up 3 flights of stairs. The amount of inconsiderate abuse people have towards them (making them wait, navigate buildings) is a poor allocation of resources.

This sounds like simple miscommunication what the provided service actually is. When I order a package off Amazon, it gets delivered to my doorstep. When I ordered a fridge from an online retailer, it got delivered to the exact room where I wanted it, and the delivery people helped me lift it out of the styrofoam packaging. Superficially both are package deliveries, even from the same delivery company, but they are conducted and paid very differently. But which of these two can/should I expect if I order cat food from doordash?

[dijonman2]

You should expect service to your door. The main reason why I pay for delivery is to avoid the 1000’ walk to the street. Of course no delivery drivers want to do this.. which is why I hire my own and pay outside an app.

[bogomipz]

>"A post a while ago on reddit was someone who was complaining about a doordasher who didn't want to wait and bring like multiple bags of cat litter like up 3 flights of stairs. The amount of inconsiderate abuse people have towards them (making them wait, navigate buildings) is a poor allocation of resources."

That's literally the "work" part of the delivery job and the reason people pay for the service and tip. As someone who held many many different delivery jobs before smart phones and turn by turn GPS, you used to also have to figure out how to "navigate streets" to actually get to the person's house too. That was actually the thinking part of the job, the rest of it was just mechanical. The idea that an expectancy to have delivery people "navigate buildings" is "inconsiderate abuse" is pretty absurd. It's equally amusing to consider the act of waiting somehow being abusive as it's a reciprocal component of any delivery experience.

[shadowgovt]

The implementation of the ADA may need to be modified for modern businesses, but the underlying principle of the ADA is "humans aren't interchangeable parts." Any efficiency gains that disproportionately marginalize the disabled are anti-human, and the cost should fall on neither the customer nor the gig employee but on the business and the government.

[Aerroon]

>Any efficiency gains that disproportionately marginalize the disabled are anti-human, and the cost should fall on neither the customer nor the gig employee but on the business and the government.

But the gig employee is the business. They're the ones that are actually rendering the delivery service. The cost naturally falls onto them, because it takes them longer to fulfill this order.

[msbarnett]

> But the gig employee is the business.

Rather, the gig employee (note that word even you used, “employee”?) is a thinly veiled fiction the actual business uses to offload risks and avoid having to pay benefits.

If the gig employee was a real business they could set prices, choose how to go about doing the job (routes to take to destination, etc), market themselves instead of acting as an interchangeable cog in the real businesses’ app, etc, etc, etc, etc

[treeman79]

Many years ago I worked at RadioShack. We changed watch batteries all the time. Zero training, just expectations.

Guy brought a watch in. I was getting ready to change it when he informed me that it was a $25,000 watch. I probably handed it back to him and said sorry, not taking responsibility for that. I was not qualified.

I can’t imagine forcing untrained people to deal with significant medical issues and be financially responsible for a fall etc.

I’ve had some severe disabilities at times, so I’ve been on both ends.

[reaperducer]

poor allocation of resources

Computers are resources. Iron ore is a resource. People aren't resources. They're people. The problem is the tech industry trying to treat people like resources.

If the delivery people are paid fairly by the delivery companies, then they will be more willing to do a good and thorough job, which includes navigating buildings.

I've been an Uber driver, and yeah, some people are awful.

But I'm also tired of getting calls from Favor delivery people telling me I have to meet them in a parking lot three miles away to collect my groceries because they're running late going to the club, and this is only a "side hustle" they do on Friday nights. If I'm paying a delivery fee, plus a tip, I expect them to complete their jobs.

[viscanti]

> The problem is the tech industry trying to treat people like resources.

Isn't that true for most types of jobs? There's a role called "Human Resources" in most medium and large sized companies. Are factory jobs leaning in to embrace the humanity of workers and not thinking of them and calling them resources? Would we find things substantially better in most fast food restaurants? Gig companies are at least letting people decide when they want to work and when they want to do something else with a degree of flexibility that seems unmatched everywhere outside of the gig economy.

[reaperducer]

There's a role called "Human Resources" in most medium and large sized companies

A title change which reflects the shift in business from treating people like people and turning them into "resources."

The role used to be called "Personnel," back when people were expected to be treated as persons.

[viscanti]

> The role used to be called "Personnel," back when people were expected to be treated as persons.

Was that before the 8 hour work day became standard? Was that before businesses were forced to stop exploiting child labor? It seems like a lot of progress has been made where things are much more humane now than they were historically. I think a more compelling argument here is that a large number of employers throughout history have been thinking of employees as cogs in a machine. I don't know that there was ever some worker utopia where they were treated like real people en masse.

[zardo]

When was it when workers could expect to be treated well by their bosses?

[petre]

When you want to get stuff done as opposed to having strikes, walkouts and other annoyances. People first and foremost want to be treated with respect, not like iron or coal or other stuff you'd dig up from the ground.

[vivegi]

Even before that it used to be called Industrial Relations (I am referring to the practice in India pre-1980s).

[googlryas]

Personnel has origins within the military...is that really what you want for some random employee?

[BurningFrog]

The labor we workers offer for sale on the labor market is a resource though.

[googlryas]

You can be both a resource for planning purposes and a human.

[shadowgovt]

The key thing here is that the optimization model for "deciding if an employee is doing a good job" has to be more complicated than "time to deliver," or it's simply anti-human.